Grow Up and Blow Away
by Verdot
Summary: She was waiting for a banjo when [she] walked in, like a desert dust storm riding in before the tease of rain. [ElenaxTifa]
1. Chapter 1

Putting this story up here gives me a little pressure to finish it. The intent is to have it play out by the end of this month... we'll see how that goes. This is a very experimental piece, I play around with format and time and space a little, but hopefully it's the readable kind of experimental. This is intended to be post-AC with some changes, namely how Tifa is behaving. There are also going to be some thematic shifts... as you can see this first chapter was rather inspired by a Western. The next chapter might be inspired by something completely different. We'll see where it goes, I guess. And all the poetry bits are done by me, so that's not quotes or anything. You can blame me for that entirely.

Oh, and Elena needs more love.

* * *

_Happiness was supposed to be:_

_Three cups of warm sunlight,  
The curl of smoke in an empty room,  
And probably some laughter._

_Happiness was not:_

_Dying on the cold wet ground,  
five inches from confession,  
and a few miles from help._

---

Sometimes it hit her at the strangest times. Standing as she was now, a couple steps distance from their rotting ex-President, Elena felt like she had in school. The half-step shadow of someone more calm. Someone that could keep her mouth shut and her heart closed. Standing a couple steps from someone that had almost been a zombie until it had started raining (to think that all they needed was a bath) she realized--

Elena might have been the half-step shadow of her sister, but at least she was alive.

But what were they, standing around as they were like corpses. Holding bombs and waiting on Tseng to stop--no, only she was waiting on Tseng. Something was keeping each of them in _escrow_ (legal arrangements were always fitting metaphors) on moving. Moving anywhere. Moving _on_. They'd tried to pull the bones from her body and she was standing back here.

Yet she was alive. No, living. That was a better way to say it.

---

"Yo, you there?"

She was staring off into space again, watching the circles that the sunlight made on the table as it passed through her empty green beer bottle. Elena, like most of them, drank because it was a good way to kill the time in between actually working. The job was a lot of fetch and carry these days, hardly the glory and glamour of what it once was. Funny how wicked deeds had more spice to them than rescuing lost people did.

"I'm here. Sorry, just... thinking."

She'd seen movies like this (it was supposed to be a saloon, though and the doors were supposed to swing instead of shut) but Reno was no cowboy and Rude certainly was no sheriff. Tseng didn't fit in that equation because he was Wutain.

"Don't think too much, your face'll get stuck that way." Reno was such an ass sometimes.

She was waiting for a banjo when _she_ walked in, like a desert dust storm riding in before the tease of rain. Elena didn't like to think so dramatically, but when even pain hadn't pulled her out of her deadened stupor people looked for something, anything, just to feel right again. Never mind that she'd never known right from wrong--she'd been raised in pigtails and flexible morality.

It wasn't quite love at first sight--because she had seen her before without the boots and the vest and the hat and the special kind of sway that a woman got when she had settled back into something that was natural--and it wasn't quite love either. But it was a glimpse and a curiosity and that was enough to make her put down the beer.

"I'll be damned." Rude said it best.

She had to wonder there and then how long Rude had been seeing Tifa Lockhart, because that was her and she had the fuzzy memories of a picture with dead people (with their living eyes, that was the only thing that had frightened her before) and that hat. Elena had a uniform that didn't involve black or blue before, clearly Tifa Lockhart had one that didn't involve black and white.

"Someone forgot to do laundry... not complaining, just someone had to say it."

Reno was such an ass sometimes.

---

_The thing about slow guitars  
Was that the twang vibrated perfectly  
With the beating of a heart._

---

Oh she envied the way she walked, like a wrangler circling with a rope, waiting on a herd chocobo to get out of line. Something had changed in the woman, and it was easy to see. Elena couldn't pull in the strays and the lost ones like that (Turks weren't lost, they were misguided, that took some kind of will) but even Tifa wasn't pulling the same tired refrain.

There was little room for pity in that skirt.

Some people would call it irresponsible the way that she played her own brand of hero, guiding people to the stations they'd set up amongst the rubble (they were forever the custodians of a dead city). Tifa's body was strong enough to drag someone if they couldn't walk, and there was the kind of will that they all possessed as hiding somewhere behind the wake of her dark hair. She wondered if it was just the kind of thing that people who chose to remain anonymous in deeds did, or if it was something that mountain air brought out in people.

Strange, the connections she made.

"Elena. Rude just radioed in, he could use some assistance in another sector."

They could all use a little foray, even if it was just dress up, back to their former selves.

---

Torture and pain was never a problem, it was realizing that she was the only one that had lived--or had even been alive to begin with--in the whole ordeal that made her ball up her fists in her bed and want to scream into her pillow.

---

"You're not with the others," she said, amused and not-quite carefree, "I'll bet it gets tiring being with the boys all the time."

Elena's Tifa spoke like she knew things about life, and maybe she did. She was a girl that didn't have an unmarred complexion (cuts and nicks on her legs, bruise-callous on her knuckles, a roadmap) so it was easy to believe that she was relating. After all, terrorism was as ambiguous as guarding the company. Elena had no doubt that both their families would clash again, for reasons that she wasn't wise enough to figure out, but experienced enough to know that they would happen.

For now, they would be like in-laws that stopped trying to be the _right ones_.

"I needed time. To breathe." (to stop feeling violated by the eyes of dead men and foreign malice)

She smiled slowly, and Elena was reminded that it wasn't polite to stare. "You ever need to talk to a woman, I'm around." There was stunted femininity in that statement, for they had both been cut off in that regard. Only Tifa had cut her knuckles and Elena had cut her hair.

It was like reading a book, looking into her heart-open face. Paperback.

"I'd like that."

---

_If everything that was sad was blue  
Was an ocean of tears  
Why weren't the fish at rock bottom?_

---

There was conspiracy afoot in the way they shared jokes over other people's heads, sometimes while shoveling cinder and those other times when Turks were shoveling poisons into themselves. Tifa Lockhart never drank, never even with her eyes. Only water. Elena chalked it up to weapon maintenance (a gunner was merely there to hold the kickback, the gun was the weapon). There was conspiracy in the way she noticed that too.

It was hard to teach Tifa that professionalism was more hard-wired into her than drinking was. Elena had always tripped over her words because she dared to speak them--everyone had always thought her unprofessional over it. Really, talking and talking at great length was the only comfort she allowed herself in the family legacy.

It assured _her_ more than anyone that she was here. _Here._

"You thinking?" Soot and ash on her arms and tar on her boots but she never failed to look like she belonged like that. Maybe that was the slums' calling card.

"I guess. It's kind of stupid." This was how women talked. Tifa was also teaching Elena as she deputized her (it helped the process, remembering that everyone was on the same side now).

The only response was a small smile that looked like a fish hook.

---

"You want to know what the new frontier is?"

Sometimes people got the feeling that the beginning wasn't even covering it. "What?"

"I'll show you."


	2. Chapter 2

Wow, way to have this done by the end of... October? Too much stuff going on, I guess. At least I managed to pick it back up without losing too much of the voice I had going, have something else that vastly different themed (and original) that helped me get back in the swing of this. And well, appropriate music. This chapter is film noir influenced, but keep the sort of Western theme in the back of your mind. So I guess less _The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly _and more _Cowboy Bebop. _Or something.

* * *

_It was convenient;  
The dame  
The grand  
And the red herring._

---

She'd expected clean, glistening, new, sparkling. There was dust in the corners and the lighting gave everything a not-mako cast. If this was the new frontier, she wanted off the track she was on.

"So this is the WRO headquarters?"

_Shut up, Elena._ She was supposed to have been told she was saying something obvious by now, but Tifa only nodded. There was an unnatural urge to grab her hand, but Elena wasn't a child anymore. She didn't cling to things (not anymore, at least, not ever again) and she certainly didn't cling to _people._

"It's... a start." She didn't even have the stomach to lie properly.

---

Elena rewound.

She'd heard the old ones talking about it when they thought no one was listening. Elena had been so _nervous_ when she first came to Midgar that she listened to anything that she was supposed to hear (and several things she wasn't supposed to, which sometimes turned her stomach and sometimes turned...) in order to not miss a beat. It took a while to train her heart not to jump at the sound of a shadow in an alley and to keep from sucking in a breath at the feel of footsteps.

Shooting in an enclosed space with glass surrounding her and sound reduction headphones on had made her a sharpshooter, but the dark streets of Midgar had almost put her back at square one. Almost.

Elena had gritted her teeth and pretended that the city didn't try to swallow her up. She closed her eyes and pretended she could smell salt (and fish and fishermen, but that kind of unpleasant wasn't threatening, just unhygienic) and be_home_. The Academy was one thing, but this, this was--

"You know what they say about girls like you in a city like this?"

Even then, she sometimes faded somewhere else, as if she could will a better world to focus in. "No."

"That if you aren't gobbled up in the first day, you're a fatale."

She'd snorted then, as she was only a trainee and he was technically older than her, though not a full Turk himself. Word was he'd whispered something that sounded like a derogatory term around the Chief, so he'd been a trainee for long enough that their age difference was enough to make her look like a real sweet young thing to his ignorant kind of eyes.

"You'll get all bitchy like Carol over there." Long legs and a hawk nose. Elena had noticed that immediately--predator bird.

But he (whatever his name was, she'd been promoted so fast because of Reno that she hadn't bothered to learn his name) had missed the point entirely. It was just like the old ones said and sometimes whispered like a seduction to their own conscience.

_You're safer on the greasy asphalt of the Slums than the cleanest metal of the upper Plate._

People didn't hear much about weapons made of asphalt anyway.

---

_Buildings aren't skeletons  
If their ghosts remain._

---

They had both stopped listening to Reeve, despite his animated speech about what the WRO really was (he was a traitor twicefold anyway, what did he expect) and where it was going. Funny how they were looking out the same dirty and cracked window when their attentions wandered. Elena only noticed because she'd found that Tifa drew attention to herself without effort, like a reed that drew water simply because of physics. Maybe it was a leftover of an academy education that she counted the minutes between glances.

It was easy to forget with all the gravedigging that all had once been a _city_. It was easy to forget with all the rubble and makeshift houses that there once were alleys and shadows along side living and breathing people. Music. Culture. Elena had never been one for the countryside, it was too empty, too much of a random wild. Contained chaos within city boundaries made more sense. Knowing that had died (bakery on fifth and that park with the stork swing that children played on) was almost worse than knowing the people had.

She had sad eyes and guitar.

Elena had to focus then, wondering if her own nostalgia was affecting her vision and hearing. But Tifa was watching her too, almost more intently. It was absurd, that a street musician would be standing on the corner for a place that didn't technically exist. Reeve had said the WRO was in the heads of the people and the notes of their speech. But this street musician didn't sound at all like Reeve's kind of delusion.

"I wonder what her name is," Tifa muttered despite the pretense of listening to Reeve. But they were learning that game of talking and not talking, and Elena liked to think of herself on the fast track to confidante at this rate. And really, who_cared_ about the WRO? What was it other than some placeholder before power sprung up again.

The street musician sang about something that was as bitter as her own momentary reflection and she stopped wanting to think about it anymore.

---

"Where'd you get the hat from?"

They were alone now, in the bar that Tifa kept up for appearances sake. Maybe the children were real, but the slow lazy way she wiped down the counters revealed that she was growing bored with staying home (they had been girls that had run with the boys, keeping the dirt off their dresses by running that much faster).

The hat wasn't on Tifa's head, but the string held it around her neck. It held up against her back like a low slum dust halo but Elena for once wasn't focused entirely too much on that.

The woman with the Costan darkened skin and the fatale dress commanded the room--all five of them this time of day--to look, to _notice_. As if she just walked into places with that smile and walk asking for hat makers all the time. Elena expected there to be a piano playing in the background and for the air to be smokier.

Would this dame contract her out to do some dirty work, find some lost lover?

"Oh, just something I've had around." But Tifa was the one that answered, a hip sway as she shifted her weight from counter cleaner to that ever reprising role as bartender (got some info, Smitty?).

"I know someone that would love a hat like that. Too bad they're hard to find." Oh, she _envied_ that kind of vivaciousness. People weren't supposed to be lively and tanned like that in this dust world that Tifa had brought her to. There was no _new_ frontier, only an old one with far too many misguided thoughts. And still.

And still, she waited for the woman to ask something more.

"Care for a drink, stranger?" Tifa asked, leaning on the bar so the tips of her hair brushed the counter like a misused feather duster.

The stranger (like one of the girls on the beach that they all used to tease, except Tseng) turned her head just so and her lovely brown eyes reminded Elena of interrogation lamps after they were turned off. That usually meant whoever was being questioned was... no longer needed.

"Actually, I was told I might find someone to hire here." The mock gesture of Tifa looking down demurely was pure coyness. One false move from the Costan femme and Tifa's and Elena's safeties would be off, no holds barred.

"Hire for..."

Oh the smile. She hoped this woman wasn't fixing to kill anyone, because Elena might just say yes to a smile like that. Of course, Elena was hardly a down on her luck detective on the wrong side of town.

"I told you, they were hard to find. A friend, basically." _Friend_ wavered a little; these were the times when even a few were still unaccounted for, even with the meticulous records of certain anal bastards. Reno made a real living playing some kind of hero this way, rent your very own chain smoking red angel for the cost of a six pack and some food.

"So what's your name?" Tifa, the business face.

"Elena."

Of course, her accent was better on the name. Elena (all the other Academy girls had cute family pet names like Missy and Babe) the Turk without a Shinra had been named with a theme in mind. Anna and Elena, an imperfectly matching set of blonde girls for an Academy family. And now this femme.

"Who are you looking for, and what are you willing to give for it?" This was the fatale speaking, and she could tell that Tifa had never heard that part of her. Then again, she'd been tied up with the Wutain that wouldn't shut up, not _Tifa_.

"Her name is Theresa. And what wouldn't I?"

Elena, the now investigator, felt as if she should have cigarette to put out at this part.

"Good answer."


	3. Chapter 3

_We could have been famous  
Enough dirt on us both  
To almost seem like glitter_

_ooo_

She had never imagined herself as the type of girl to be clinging to the back of some boy's motorcycle, so speeding across broken highways on one was more than a little strange.

This other Elena, the one held tightly to Tifa's waist as they went so fast that the city streets still seemed like they used to be, was an Elena that she was starting to like. She'd ditched the tie (what were they going to do, demote her to less than nothing?) and unbuttoned a few buttons on her shirt so that the wind didn't just get in her hair. It tingled.

That dark-haired Elena had pulled the gil to pay them from a strategically placed garter, and Tifa had dismissed the gawking males in the room with barely a glance. She'd been a singer, she'd said. They both had been, her and Theresa, singers and beautiful people (everyone always knew who the beautiful people were).

Where they were heading wasn't just another broken down place. It was a broken down place that had once been something magnificent.

The signs (no, she didn't want to buy anything) and the posters (what the heck had that stupid play been about anyway) made a perverse red carpet for Tifa to pull up to.

If there had been cameras, they'd have looked a mess, because cool as a motorcycle was it was murder to hairstyles. Of course, Tifa just pulled out the almost useless hairtie and shook all that dark hair out like slum royalty, ready for dancing--hostile or otherwise.

"I never did go to the theater..." she muttered, kicking the stand for the cycle and dismounting. Elena followed, likely looking like a dandelion, judging by the bits of hair that haloed her vision.

"It's overrated anyway. Just a lot of people spouting bad poetry and Plate brats dressed up with nowhere better to go."

"Oh. Well."

Of course, that's not at all what she'd thought at first about the lights and the way that the theater house seemed to swallow her whole and never want to give her back again.

_ooo_

The lights of Midgar had been the brightest she'd ever seen and the Academy certainly wasn't low on power. She'd come there at night the first time, and she'd been expecting darkness (anyone that was anything and had been there said that the shadow hung throughout the daytime) but at night it was decadent with light.

She'd still been small then, in the car with her father and sister, but while Anna looked at Shinra Tower like it meant _something_ she'd just been distracted by the glitter of it, like that expensive sort of materia that was only for the guns she wasn't allowed to touch yet.

_Make a wish on a star, but if that doesn't work, wish on the lights of Midgar._

_ooo_

"You think anyone would live here? Especially this part of town?"

"People used to live in cardboard boxes when there was a city, can't imagine it'd be any different now."

The last place Theresa had been was this theater, the other Elena had said in a way that suggested this was a regular thing before Midgar had been given up to atone to the Planet. Tifa moved through the decay like she was used to it, and she had to be. Elena only ever came below the Plate on missions, and even then she was something Other (oh crap, it's a suit, everyone scatter).

She could find the pulse of old Midgar in that sway.

"I think the stage is this way," she said, dark hair parting in such a way to make it seem like an invitation.

The only times Elena had ever been near even the idea of a stage was to be singled out; the rookie, the captive, the example. It settled badly in her stomach (you can't look scared, it only brings out the predators) so she would hang around the wings. She fit better there anyway, bad jokes about shadows in the night notwithstanding. Rude and Reno used to practically bend her ear over it.

Tifa was right, as they made it into the dust and cobwebs, little shufflings of the vagrants that huddled under seats and on balconies. Of course Tifa was right. Elena remembered the file, remembered that her and the boy wonder were country kids, small town sorts. But that had been shed as glamour of the theater had been shed in the great purge. Even in ruins, the city changed people. Integrated into the slums, Tifa would always know.

Maybe it was because she hadn't come from such humble beginnings that Elena hadn't been changed for the better.

"I wish I had a light," Tifa murmured more than spoke. Elena was at her elbow in an instant, producing her small keychain flashlight.

One sad guitar on a lone chair on an empty stage. Someone had made a game for them.

_ooo_

_That I would dance alone  
With you and the golden light  
Of a thousand people watching_

_ooo_

"Someone's got a sense of humor." Tifa traced smiley faces and rainbows and flowers, the things that covered the guitar in such a way that made it seem more like a message than an oversight. Elena didn't think the joke was particularly funny.

"Do you really think this Theresa is really missing? Or is someone trying to mess with us?"

Tifa obviously wasn't a Midgar native by her lack of doubt with some things. Elena wasn't really either, but it had been drilled into her head by chiefs and mentors that the city was really all they had. Shinra was just the heart of it (and somewhat empty at that). She almost looked scandalized by the suggestion. But she quickly softened.

"What matters is that Elena thinks she's missing."

They were out the back exit of the theatre before the real creeps came in. There was quite a variation in the creeps nowadays, after the whole Geostigma epidemic. In a way it was comforting; the homogeny of slit-eyes and their ways of gathering in the strangest of places (tie the man first, the girl won't be as much of a problem).

"Are you still there, Elena?"

She stopped thinking about that. Nothing good would come of going there.

"I'm here. At least we found some kind of clue. Even if it's a weird one."

Tifa was getting the dreamy expression that must have been more common to her when she was younger. Elena didn't want to stare, and she had always thought the preoccupation with innocence was more of male problem (the boss always liked _her_ more, even if that was a charade), but she was starting to think it was an age one. At the beginning she had been preoccupied with experience after all. It had taken one afternoon to change all that.

"I wonder what she sang about. I hope that when we find her, she'll share."

There was a pang (of jealousy, maybe) at the statement, but Elena Warren wasn't going to let unrequited feelings get the best of her again. She was going to find the damned dreamer and hope that the girl only sang of the dust and the decay and all the things that were truly real around them. Judging by the happy faces on the guitar, though, she was most likely to be crazy enough to stick a flower in a gun barrel.

"We have a clue, but not a lead." She was the one carrying the guitar, and set it down to stare at the childish scribblings all over it.

Tifa smirked. "Aren't you trained to track people down with just the smallest scrap of a clue?"

And Elena couldn't help but grin a little at that. "Maybe the old fogies, but in my day we took pictures of things with our PHS's and let the geeks handle that."

Thankfully, she still had the best in mobile technology at her fingertips and some particularly useful geeks had survived.

_ooo_

"It's a very creatively designed map. Of the underground."

Reeve had clearly missed his more technical duties, judging by the gleeful tone in his voice as he described whatever visual reconstructive reader thingiedoodle had given him the clearest picture he could ask for regarding the map. It looked like bad modern art combined with a toddler's spaghetti sauce tantrum to her, but to Reeve it seemingly spoke poetry.

"The underground?"

The image peeled away the top layer of noise (you have to get under all the dirt, Elena) and it really did look like a map then. She looked over at Tifa, who had propped her head on her elbow and was focused rather intently.

"We've had reports that certain clusters of survivors went under the city during Meteorfall, but never surfaced. The prevailing theory is that some of them think that the world ended and just settled there."

Elena flicked a piece of lint off her sleeve. "And the other theories?"

"Well, they were already living there in the first place. Some of them."

Tifa stood up. "Well, that's where we're going. Think we can borrow any toys?"

For a leader, Reeve was certainly easy to get things from. Elena remembered the request forms and how Reno used to whine at how long it took for something to come through. They stopped asking and swiped Tseng's access card instead after a while. He pretended not to notice. She had to wonder if willful ignorance was required for that position.

"And... just the two of you are going?"

"What you think we need bodyguards?"

Reeve laughed pretty genuinely at that. Elena had to wonder what would have happened if he'd spoken up sooner.

_ooo_

_Threatening shadows only become  
Scary monsters  
With the dilation of the eye_

_ooo_

To know that Midgar had burrowed into the planet like a tumor only made sense. Elena imagined that the subterranean dwellers would have been there even if everything had burned. And judging by the subconscious way that Tifa touched a spot on her chest, like a survivor would clutch a locket, fire was on her mind too.

"Do you think that this is where all the dead went?"

Elena was surprised at her tone after all the confidence she'd seen from her. Tifa Lockheart had survived the lie of dreams and the reality of horrors. The wistful bit of breath (do you respect the lost?) was compromising the image she'd built up.

But didn't she always do that? Build someone up into an ikon instead of touch them like a person?

"I never really believed in the promised land, so... this always seemed more likely."

When she took Tifa's hand, it didn't feel like grasping a child's to comfort them, or taking a teacher's to be comforted (there's no comfort in them anyway). It felt like two trees that grew closely together must have felt. And it allowed them to walk forward into the tunnel entrance.

The faint sounds of a Costan guitar kept them moving forward.


End file.
